truly did believe her every word. They had defended her again and again from the complaints and the little nips, and in one case from a screeching crowd of the incredulous.
For a time, Johanna had been tempted to throw her own radio overboard: just wait for a stormy night and hope that no Tines heard her commit the act. But then she noticed the occasional Tines sniffing around the radio crates. Such random contrarians were a major source of choir creativity. When their foolishness didn’t kill them, these fragments discovered things no one else had imagined. Even if the mob stayed generally loyal, eventually someone would break into those crates—and the fleet’s radio silence would fail in a big way.
So she might as well hold on to her own radio. It took some nights of work, messing around under the blankets, but she’d managed to get the gadget open and remove the spring on the send switch. She was a little unclear about mechanical springs, what would make them push or pull when you pushed and pulled on them—so she took out all the little moving parts. She bet herself that even the mob’s distributed intellect couldn’t make that button work.
After that, she put the radio out in the sun. The mob immediately swirled around her, amazingly quiet. They were listening intently as only Tines can. After a time, they relaxed a bit. Cheepers reported to her, “It sounds like this.” He played back his amplified interpretation, a clicking and stuttering that sounded like random impulsive noise to Johanna. Maybe Nevil had given up on his robot query—but then loud noises came from the box, interrupting Cheepers’ rendition. It was that Tinish voice, asking for a reply again and again. The mob went wild trying to answer—with no success, of course.
The transmission ceased after about five minutes. An hour later, the voice loop ran again, and again an hour after that. Vendacious and Nevil were just poking them desultorily on the off chance that comms could be established. Johanna smiled to herself.
They were past Woodcarver’s old downcoast capital. To the east, Johanna recognized the cliffs and glacier- reamed valleys of the Domain, of … of home. The west was no longer open sea. The islands of the North began as little mounds. Gradually, she saw more and more of them, half-drowned mountains that turned this part of the sea into a network of straits. Very soon they would run into Hidden Island or Cliffside and things would get really exciting. One way or another she wouldn’t have to drink fetid water and choose between smoked meat and raw fish anymore.
One afternoon, multiboats flying Domain colors came into view. The vessels cruised along on the mainland side of her path, but at a distance, never coming close. When Johanna first saw them, she almost raced to the top of her raft to wave and shout. Surely Nevil and Vendacious hadn’t taken over Woodcarver’s Domain? Surely?
In fact, she didn’t know, so she hunkered down, out of sight.
The next day, her radio was still receiving hourly pokes from Nevil or Vendacious, but now there were more interesting sounds. Many of these were lost in noise, but Cheepers and his friends repeated them to her clearly. They were human voices; they belonged to Nevil’s special pals.
The conversations were fragmented and one-sided. Nevil was using
“Yeah, Nevil, there’s ten barges, just where you said. What?… How should I know? They look like junk to me.” That was Tami Ansndot, as argumentative as ever. “One is only halfsize, like it got split down the middle.… So why don’t you have Scrupilo fly over in that gasbag of his, and take a look?”
There was a pause, probably for Nevil’s explanation of why Scrupilo couldn’t help. Johanna bit her lip, trying to imagine just what lie was being peddled, and what it covered up.
She recognized all the voices, Deniers with some forest experience. Nevil must think these rafts were important. So where was her brother’s voice?
Throughout the afternoon, Johanna continued to listen. Here and there, she picked up useful information. Her flotilla was indeed important; somehow it would reveal Woodcarver as the “obstructionist fool we’ve always suspected”—that tidbit from some idiot obviously parroting Nevil’s current propaganda. A great treaty was about to be consummated; these ten rafts would seal the bargain and show the way to the new future.
At one point Tami said something like, “Too bad about Jo and Ravna. If only they could be here, to see how wrong they were about everything.”
Johanna was just as glad she couldn’t hear the choked up, false grief coming back from Nevil.
“The last raft just passed my position.” This was a new voice. It sounded like Bili Yngva. No, it was his little brother. Merto probably knew all about the murders and betrayal, but he wasn’t quite as smooth as Bili or Nevil. Right now, he sounded furtive. “No. Like I told you, there’s no sign of a human on any of the boats. Why don’t you just send someone out to check on them before they land?… Yeah, yeah. Well after today, that’s all gonna change.”
Chapter 37
For the next twenty hours, Tycoon’s airship buzzed back and forth, knocking at the door of the mountain airs, hoping to finally find the winds asleep or at least flowing in the proper direction. Somewhere before dawn, Tycoon’s strategy paid off—or maybe Nevil figured out how to coordinate the orbiter’s observations with
In any case, by late the next morning both airships had made it over the top of the Icefangs and were descending. On this side of the mountains, the day was a gloom of towering clouds, clouds above and below. The chop and the buffeting was not clear air turbulence, but the violence of thundering squalls.
When the ship’s steward came for Ravna and Jefri, the light was still as dim as dawn—except for an occasional flash of lightning. The three of them, with gunpack trailing behind, made their way along the main corridor, which was swaying far more than usual.
Ravna wriggled up the spiral stairs into Tycoon’s bow chamber. Behind her, Jefri climbed up almost as easily. Apparently, Tycoon had removed some of the railings, widening the stairway just enough for him.
As usual, the view from the bow was spectacular, but there were no sun-dazzled glaciers this morning. Tycoon’s airship was scudding through the bottoms of clouds. From moment to moment there was zero visibility— then they would see forested valleys, and meadows that were impossibly green beneath deep clouds and rain.
Most of Tycoon was gazing out at the sky, as usual pretending to ignore such trivia as the arrival of his prisoners. Stretching off to port and starboard were ranked kilometer after kilometer of clouds. Lightning played between them and the ground below. Every few seconds, the bow was lit by a blinding flash, and thunder shook the grid of the windshield. Tycoon flinched, then turned a head or two back in the direction of Ravna and Jefri. “There is nothing to be alarmed about. Vendacious tells me that we’ll come out of the storm area in less than half an hour.”
Fifteen minutes of very bumpy ride followed this assurance. Tycoon and his various remote advisors exchanged occasional remarks, but it was all Interpack gobble. There were at least four packs talking through Zek. One of them was clearly Vendacious; another seemed to be the godsgift who had been on the network the day before. She heard Nevil’s name popping up now and then.
“Tycoon is sounding less and less pleased with Nevil’s advice,” Jefri whispered to her. Two of Tycoon looked up at Jef’s words, but otherwise the pack continued to ignore them.
Twenty minutes passed. They had lost sight of the ground. Who knew what mountain height lurked just ahead? Then, in the space of ten seconds, the ship broke through the edge of the squall line, emerging from bright cliffs of cloud. They were well within the Domain, past the hardscrabble farms of cotters and peasants, approaching
